When searching for our client's brand name, their previous sponsors name is shown within the Site Links to a very important page. We are keen to change this reference within the Site Link but keep the link itself.

We have untaken the following without any change to the words used within this particular Site Link:

1) Removal of previous-sponsors name sitewide:

Title tags

Alt attribute

Anchors

Page names

Image names

2) Removal of sponsors name from 200+ sister sites:

Title tags

Alt attribute

Anchors

Page names

Image names

3) Modification of [previous-sponsor + client] within Wikipedia:There were 250+ mentions of the sponsor + client within Wikipedia. References have either been deleted or changed to past tense. (Google has been extremely slow at indexing these changes.)

4) Removal of off-site mentions:After using Advanced Filters within OSE, we extracted all links that included the previous-sponsors name. We filtered these by DA and approached these sites and requested they update their links/on-site content to include the up-to-date name. This included large news organisations and reference sources.

We also used Google operators (inurl, inanchor, intitle) to search for references mentions of [previous-sponsor + client]. We used Buzzstream to collate this data and contacted hundreds of sites sorted by DA.

5) We have twice requested demotion of the Site Link via GWT without success. Google clearly see's the Site Link as too important to remove it.

The following is useful background information:The [client + previous-sponsor] worked together for 5+ years. Our client is known by it's own brand, but it was also called in certain arenas as [client + previous-sponsor].Fresh mentions of [client + previous-sponsor] are frequent. Examples of this are from collectors merchandise and videos that are posted frequently.

The page being shown within the Site Links is essential. It cannot be moved. With a PA of mid-70's.We have changed the Title of the page multiple times, without any change to the Site Link.

3 Responses

Have all the pages on all the sites you control and have revised been resubmitted? If you leave it to Google to do this on their own, it will take a very long time, most likely years before they are all gone. Even tho its a very simple tool, try using the "fetch as Google" tool in Webmaster tools. This can be done on both an individual URL basis, or you can resubmit the entire page and all its connected links. Once you have submitted all the offending URL's that contain the revised information, refresh the sitemap, and resubmit the entire site(s).

For the Wiki pages that you dont own, it will take a long time for the indexed result to change, but as long as the information on the page that it links to doesnt contain the information you dont want, you are fine. Since Wiki is so large, it may take some time for them to revise that indexed data. On the other hand, since Wiki is so big and is most likely crawled daily by Google, you might see chnages quickly. How long has it been since you modified the info?

For the on site issues, if you are seeing a very slow reindex of the modified pages, you could also create entirely new pages, and have the old page 301 redirect to the new one that does not contain the sponser.

One more thing you could try is a press release stating that the alliance no longer exists. Word it in a positive light.

I would also use a 301 redirect to a new page. You'll catch all the traffic going to the old page that way and also if Google visits it will follow that path. You could then even notice that Google changed the site link for you. It has happened on several occasions.

I thought the following may be useful to you. After extensive testing, we followed this process to remove the Sitelink:

We added <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow"> only to the page shown within the Sitelinks. Within our tests we found removing the page within GWT only elongated the removal process, therefore we refrained from doing this. Within GWT we did a Fetch and Render to inform Google of the change.

Within less than 24 hours the Sitelink was removed from the SERPs and organic sessions have not been effected whatsoever.